Logging Ban In Thailand

Program Area

This activity is designed for a Grade 10 Geography of Eurasia class. It would best fit into the unit of study on Thailand's economy and natural resources.

Learning Outcomes

Teaching, learning and evaluation will focus on the student's ability to: Understand the impact of logging on mountain villages of Thailand; Understand the reason for a ban on logging in Thailand.; Recognize the power environmental groups have in enacting government legislation.

Classroom Development

• Have your students find Thailand in their atlas. Discuss the impact on the residents of the varying topography. Ask your students: Why would forestry be important to this economy?
• Have your students read the article Thailand Imposes Logging Ban, then have them answer the following questions:

Questions

1. What is the significance of Prime Minister Choonhaven's ban on logging in Thailand?
2. Describe the three types of public pressure for the ban.
3. How had forest cover been altered since 1961?
4. Describe the conflict of interest in Thailand's forests between multinational corporations and local native peoples.
5. How might reforestation programs with eucalyptus trees cause problems for the local ecology?
6. Is this logging ban a good idea? Explain your answer.
7. Will other Pacific countries need to deal with logging companies in the future? Explain.

Timing

• 10 min for Thailand map discussions
• 30 min for the questions from the article
• 15 min to take up the questions and discuss the issue

Resources: periodicals on Thailand; topics: books on forestry in South Pacific rim countries.

Cross-disciplinary Links:

A science class could examine the role of forests in holding soil and moisture within an ecosystem and their role in the maintenance of biodiversity.

Thailand Imposes Logging Ban

Thailand's total ban on logging, probably the first of its kind in the world, has been hailed as a major environmental victory. But multinational companies planing to patent forest products and to set up industrial plantations may pose new threats to the natural forest.

The forest conservation movement in Thailand, which has been growing steadily in the last few years, achieved its most striking success so far on 10 January 1989 with the approval by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan of a nationwide logging ban, possibly the first of its kind in the world.

The ban was the result of public pressure of three types. The first consisted of increasingly strident protests from rural villagers, particularly in the hilly north of the country, against timber companies' destruction of catchment areas and traditional irrigation systems crucial for agricultural subsistence.

The second was a campaign among conservationists and others against a 1988 Judicial Council ruling that unexpectedly reactivated logging concession agreements in some of the county's most important wildlife sanctuaries and other protected areas.

The third (and most decisive politically) derived from the widespread public shock and outrage at deforestation related mudslides in South Thailand in November 1988 which took the lives of hundreds and buried villages and farmland under metres of logs, uprooted trees and sand.

With the effects of decades of commercial forest exploitation increasingly threatening the well-being of the rural majority, historical conditions were ripe for the growth of a grassroots movement powerful enough to force the government into defying the politically well-connected logging interests.

By 1988, with forest cover down to 18 per cent of the land area from 53 percent in 1961, the connections between deforestation and erosion, floods and drought had become very clear to everyone. There was thus perhaps more potential for the growth of environmental politics than in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Brazil, where tree cover remains more extensive and the consequences of large-scale deforestation are less a matter of everyday experience for the population as a whole.

The Thai ban is not without loopholes which will facilitate a certain amount of cheating by timber firms for another year or so. And perfect enforcement will not be easy. Nevertheless, it will be difficult by and large for logging companies to get around the ban, or to make exaggerated demands for compensation.

Part of this is due to the specificity of the clauses of the laws themselves, some of which were modeled directly on suggestions by environmentalists. One clause, for example, requires timber companies wishing to remove logs remaining in the forest to prove that they were legally felled prior to the ban; another voids preexisting concessions in any forest gazetted as a wildlife sanctuary.

More important, however, will be the vigilance of the public and press, which will now have a green light to agitate against surreptitious activities of commercial loggers. Parliamentarians, army officers and other bureaucrats, for their part, will be reluctant in the foreseeable future to risk their political careers by trying openly to overturn the popular ban.

The victory over commercial logging is rapidly helping to bring other environmental issues to the fore. Since the momentum began building to stop domestic logging, Thai businessmen and bureaucrats have been vigorously seeking new sources of timber to the country's thousands of sawmills from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the Ivory Coast.

The challenge to Thai environmentalists is to suggest ways of reducing demand for tropical timber at home and to offer renewed support for forest conservation attempts abroad, in order to ensure that Thailand's forest problems are not simply imported elsewhere.

Another challenge is posed by the incipient attempt of farsighted multinational corporations and their allies in international organizations to take more of a hand in the conservation of protected areas.

Taking advantage of the current climate of concern for tropical nature, many companies are mapping out ways of getting a lock on endangered genetic raw material in primary forests (as well as the knowledge of forest natives about its uses), so that it can one day be turned into patented agribusiness, pharmaceutical or biotechnological commodities.

Ambitious "biodiversity preservation" plans are being drawn up for Thai and other Southeast Asian forests which will bring together bodies such as the World Resources Institute, Weyer-hauser, European pharmaceutical companies, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Wide Fund for Nature, and various national governments.

Some grassroots oriented environmental campaigners see risks both to democracy and to nature in allowing such organizations to take control of forests away form the local peoples who have the most interest in preserving them.

Environmental groups are also concerned about the taking over of community land by industrial wood companies. Now that logging is officially "out" and reforestation "in" in Thailand, both domestic and multinational corporations are rushing to plant fast-growing Australian eucalyptus varieties on whatever land they can rent or buy.

Their hope is to make large profits of paper-pulp or wood-chip exports. In this they have the blessing of a government eager for foreign exchange and well aware that it itself doesn't have the resources to reforest the country. Thai villagers and environmentalists as a whole agree with the goal of reforestation, but want to know reforestation by whom, with what and where?

Renting so-called ":degraded" government forests to private firms for capital-intensive eucalyptus operations tends to push squatters previously resident on the land to encroach on forest frontiers elsewhere just as resettlement schemes are doing in Brazil and Indonesia.

Without serious attempts a land reform, environmentalist warn, commercial "reforestation" often only accelerates deforestation. Many squatters are suggesting that they be allowed to keep their land, planting fruit or rubber trees on it for their own benefit and preserving nearby patches of natural forest for the good of the community.

Noting that eucalyptus plantations provide few of the benefits rural Thais are accustomed to getting from their varied local forests (including fodder, firewood, mushrooms, game and red ant eggs for protein, herbal medicines and resins), they point out that they tend to hog local groundwater and spoil the soil for other crops and trees as well.

Environmentalists add that in practice, large-scale eucalyptus growers and contractors tend to promote eucalyptus on large tracts of land which necessarily include patches of either natural forest or relatively fertile land better suited to more conventional crops and orchards.

So far, resistance to commercial reforestation with eucalyptus is confined mainly to environmentalists and villagers who have direct experience of it, particularly in seven or eight provinces in the north east of the country. Given the current political climate and the deep-rooted conflicts over resource use involved, however, the movement has the potential of spreading more quickly than previously anticipated.

Larry Lohmann. Development and Cooperation. No. 3, 1989.